Abstract
This chapter focuses on a specific multilingual and multicultural classroom. It addresses translation and interpreting-oriented language learning and teaching (TILLT) for future translators and interpreters. This particular form of tertiary level language learning and teaching is looked at from the perspective of higher education pedagogy by stressing the value of students' insights, experiences, and perspectives on academic language learning and teaching. The purpose of the chapter is to make a case for engaging students as partners in learning, teaching, and in classroom-based research.
TopBackground
The following ideas and suggestions are contextualized within German as a foreign language teaching in a multilingual and multicultural classroom at an Austrian University. There, the author has been teaching German as a foreign language in the levels B2 and C1 of the CEFRL (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) for almost two decades now, particularly within the Bachelor’s programme Transcultural Communication at the Department for Translation Studies. Recent scholarship highlights the fact that language learning and teaching in translator and interpreter training should be approached very differently from, for example, within the philologies (Schmidhofer, 2019; Stachl-Peier & Schwarz, 2020). One essential distinction, for example, is that translation and interpreting students have to develop a translator identity in addition to a foreign language learner identity. The activities that will be discussed in this chapter reconsider the power dynamics between students and teachers in the multilingual classroom, here considered as a learning space for co-participants (Li, 2020). The practical examples include ideas of how to enhance mutual trust and respect as to openly share ideas on topics such as language as symbolic power (Kramsch, 2021), native speaker ideology (Dewaele et al., 2022), translingual practices (Lee & Dovchin, 2020) or translation and translanguaging (Baynham & Lee, 2019).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Translanguaging: The dynamic process whereby multilingual individuals mediate complex social and cognitive activities by employing multiple semiotic resources.
TILLT: It stands for Translation and Interpreting oriented Language Learning and Teaching and is an approach to translator and interpreter education in terms of linguistic skills.
Multi-Competence: The overall system of a mind or a community that uses more than one language.
Translinguistics: It represents an alternative to conventional paradigms of language, which assume the compartmentalization of different ‘languages’, by rejecting fixed and arbitrary boundaries and reflecting the fluid use of linguistic and semiotic resources in diverse communities.
DLC: A Dominant Language Constellation (DLC) is the constellation of one’s dominant, most important (vehicle) languages, functioning as an entire unit and enabling a person to meet their needs in a multilingual environment.
Mediation: Linguistic mediation is a type of assisted interaction among individuals who, otherwise, would be unable to communicate. Mediation tasks can be intralinguistic or interlinguistic.
LX User: LX refers to any language acquired after the age at which one’s first language(s) was/were acquired. The dichotomy ‘L1 user’ versus ‘LX user’ replaces the one of ‘Native speaker’ versus ‘Non-native speaker’. It does not imply any level of proficiency and has no connotation of inferiority.